


Too Much

by GoldenNickel



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Depression, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-17 17:58:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9336065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenNickel/pseuds/GoldenNickel
Summary: Grantaire doesn't wake up in time to die with Enjolras. Instead he survives and is left to grieve for his fallen friends.





	

When Grantaire woke, he found himself not where he had fallen asleep. Instead he was lying side by side with the rest of Les Amis on the cold, hard stone floor of a small room. Horrified, he realized that of all his companions, he was the only one still drawing breath.

The soldiers, in their haste to clean up the barricade and the bodies of the revolutionaries, had failed to notice that one of the “dead” still lived. They’d laid him with the rest of the fallen, at the end of the line of bodies, and left him there.

The area was empty but for the motionless bodies of Grantaire’s friends. Grantaire hauled himself to his feet and looked out the doorway to the room in despair. Blood still pooled in the street. The blood of the French soldiers who had died fighting for their king. The blood of Grantaire’s friends who had died fighting for their belief in a France that was free from inequality. No living soul was around, except for Grantaire.

Grantaire turned back and stared down at his friends. They didn’t look as if they were sleeping. There was too much blood for him to even try to fool himself into thinking that. They looked cold and very much dead.

Joly. Bossuet. Courfeyrac. Combeferre. Bahorel. Jehan. Feuilly. Gavroche. Éponine…

Enjolras.

All of them were there, lying side by side, until the soldiers returned to dispose of them.

Grantaire’s heart shattered in that moment. If only he’d been awake during the fighting. If only he hadn’t been a drunken fool. If only he hadn’t been good for nothing. Just a waste of space. Couldn’t even die fighting alongside his friends. If only he’d been awake… He may not have made much of a difference in the battle, but at least he could have died with his friends.

Before anyone returned and discovered him alive, Grantaire hastened away from that damned place. He’d seen more than he’d wanted to, anyway. The image of his dead friends would forever be burned into his mind. Grantaire stumbled around the streets, sticking to alleyways and avoiding crowds, until he collapsed.

There, in some abandoned alley, Grantaire held his knees to his chest and wept. He struggled to contain the sobs that escaped his lips; he tried to control his rapid breathing, but he could not. His grief overtook him.

* * *

Grantaire was once again stumbling through the streets of Paris, but for a different reason. Having been forcibly tossed from several taverns already, Grantaire was drunkenly wandering around in search of a place to drink in peace. It didn’t occur to him that _he_ was the reason for the fights that kept breaking out in the bars that he visited. In his hand, he held an almost-empty bottle of wine.

He stopped in front of an inn and was considering going in to see if they had a bar when he heard a voice that was choked with emotion.

“G- _Grantaire?_ R… _is that you?_ ”

Grantaire turned towards the voice, nearly falling to the ground as he tripped over his own foot, and saw Marius staring at him in shock. Marius had been heading home from work when he’d noticed the dark-haired man wobbling down the street.

Grantaire looked around and then down at himself before replying “I suppose it is…” in a sullen voice.

“What are you doing here?! I thought- I thought you’d _died!_ ”

“Unfortunately not,” Grantaire murmured, his voice void of all emotion. Marius didn’t hear.

“Did anyone else-? Are they-? Is anyone else alive?” Marius asked, his own voice full of hope.

“They’re all dead,” Grantaire confirmed, draining the rest of the wine from the bottle. He held the bottle upside down and sighed at its emptiness.

“How did you…?” Marius let his question trail off as he took in Grantaire’s appearance. He was thinner than Marius remembered. His clothes hung off him like rags. His eyes had dark circles underneath them. He smelled strongly of alcohol, more than he had before the rebellion. His lip was split and he had a scabbed-over gash on his left cheekbone.

“Grantaire, it’s been over a year since-. Where have you been?”

“Around.” Grantaire shrugged.

“Won’t you come home with me? I can give you food and drink. Not wine,” he clarified.

“I’m going home,” Grantaire suddenly decided. He turned away from Marius and began walking away unsteadily. Marius followed him.

“May I come along?” he asked politely, having no intention of letting Grantaire out of his sight. Grantaire just shrugged again and kept walking.

After a few minutes the pair reached a shabby looking one-story building. Grantaire opened the door and stepped into his home; Marius followed.

Marius looked around, absorbing the details of Grantaire’s home. The floor was littered with empty bottles. In the room they were standing in, there was a bed, a chair, and a table for furniture. An easel stood in one corner with a stool in front of it. Against nearly every surface leaned a painting. Some were finished, some were not. Some were stacked in front of each other so Marius couldn’t see what they showed.

Marius studied one painting in particular. It was propped on the one chair in the room, facing the bed so that when Grantaire was laying there he could see it clearly.

The scene was of that small room in the Café Musain. It featured Les Amis de l’ABC sitting at several tables. They were all smiling. Even painted-Grantaire had a grin on his face as he watched painted-Enjolras lead the meeting.

“I painted that one before,” Grantaire explained quietly. “Before everything went to Hell.”

“It’s beautiful…” Marius tore his eyes away from the painting and looked around at some of the more recent creations.

Faces. The faces of friends Marius had believed he would never see again, even in painted form. So life-like that they brought tears to Marius’s eyes. There was one painting for each of Les Amis individually. Their faces were not happy in these paintings. They were expressionless. Each of them had splatters of red paint across them, dripping down their faces.

Another painting featured a graveyard with a tombstone for each of Grantaire’s deceased friends. The graves all had flowers painted in front of them. The one marked ‘Enjolras’ had a wreathe made of red roses as well as several bouquets of flowers surrounding it. There was no grave for Marius.

“So, you knew I was alive?” Marius asked, trying to keep the accusing tone out of his voice.

“I did,” admitted Grantaire, avoiding Marius’s gaze.

“Why didn’t you come see me?”

Grantaire stared at the painting for several moments before he spoke.

“It was too much.”

“Too much?”

“I just…I couldn’t, Marius. I couldn’t…”

Marius nodded. “I understand.”

Grantaire looked up at the other man. Tears were shining in both pairs of eyes. Grantaire’s slid down his cheeks and dropped to the floor.

Marius averted his eyes and focused again on the paintings. They were all dark and depressing. Nearly all of them featured Les Amis in some way or another. There were several depictions of the barricade. One had Enjolras and the rest of Les Amis – bar Grantaire – slung across the barricade, blood dripping to the street below. Another showed a line of their bodies in an otherwise-empty room. Others were not of Les Amis, but were still alarming nonetheless. A street stained with blood. A dark, hooded figure with no face. A noose hung from a tree with someone who looked scarily like Grantaire hanging from it. Marius looked away from the horrifying paintings and, unsure where to look, stared at the floor instead.

“Do you…do you still sell your paintings?” Marius asked eventually.

“Not-.” Grantaire cleared his throat, “Not these ones… But yes. I paint landscapes for people, mostly. Some portraits. They sell well enough for me to keep living here.”

“And for you to stay well stocked with wine,” Marius noted.

Grantaire shrugged.

“Drinking makes it easier.”

* * *

Marius visited Grantaire several times a week after his discovery that one of his friends had survived. Cosette shared his joy, but she never joined Marius on his visits. Grantaire had never met Cosette and she thought him meeting her now would serve no purpose in helping him out of his depression. If anything, seeing Marius happy and in love while Grantaire was miserable would only make things worse.

Marius offered for Grantaire to come and live with him several times, but Grantaire refused.

On each visit, Marius would bring Grantaire food and drink. He insisted that Grantaire eat something while he was there; Marius suspected that Grantaire ate only the bare minimum when left on his own. Grantaire continued to produce more paintings that only served to worry Marius about his friend’s mental state.

On several occasions, Marius arrived at Grantaire’s home to find it empty. He would then spend his time scouring Paris in search of his drunk friend. More often than not, Grantaire could be found at one of several bars, but occasionally Marius would have to spend several hours wandering around before he found Grantaire passed out in some alleyway. Once he found him outside of a whorehouse, having been thrown from the premises by the angry owner of the establishment for his drunken behavior.

Sometimes Marius would find Grantaire passed out on the floor of his home, surrounded by freshly emptied bottles of several different kinds of alcohol. Marius would only sigh and begin cleaning up the place while the drunkard slept.

Grantaire showed no signs of appreciation towards Marius’s attempts to help him recover. In fact, more often than not Grantaire grew enraged at Marius and would throw bottles (sometimes empty, sometimes not) at the redhead in an attempt to scare him off. On these days Marius would wait outside Grantaire’s door until Grantaire had calmed down enough for Marius to reenter.

On rare days when Grantaire was in a better mood (Better, not good. Grantaire didn’t have good moods anymore.) Marius would ask him to walk in the park with him.

“It’s good to get outside sometimes,” Marius insisted. “Get outside and _not_ go drinking. You need fresh air, my friend.”

Grantaire would consent to the walks only to get Marius to stop nagging him.

Marius grew more and more worried by his friend’s ever-increasing depression. He could see that Grantaire wished that Marius would just give up on him, but that wasn’t something Marius was willing to do.

“You’re my friend, R,” Marius stated one day, his voice welling up with emotion. “I wish I knew what to do…”

“Don’t call me that,” Grantaire growled venomously, “Never call me R again, you hear?!”

The nickname only made him think of better days. He took a swing towards Marius, but Marius dodged.

“Okay, okay.” Marius held his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry, Grantaire. Truly.”

Grantaire made noise deep in his throat and went back to his bottle.

* * *

Marius arrived at Grantaire’s door on a hot June afternoon and knocked softly. It had been exactly three years now since Barricade Day. The previous June, Marius had discovered that Grantaire’s depression only deepened as the anniversary drew near. He was more prone to sullen silences – he ate less and drank more – he was quicker to anger.

For several weeks before the third anniversary, Marius watched Grantaire closer than ever. Grantaire had spent nearly every waking moment either drinking or painting – usually both.

Grantaire’s painting had devolved into dark spatters on the canvas, sometimes with streaks of red thrown in. It had been months since he’d sold anything. Marius was now supporting Grantaire financially – a situation which Grantaire despised and Marius accepted without hesitation.

After waiting outside the door for several minutes, Marius knocked again, louder this time. Still no answer. Marius fished in his pockets for his key to Grantaire’s door, balancing the food he had brought in one hand so that he could unlock the door with the other.

When the door swung open, Marius dropped the groceries he had been holding and they crashed to the floor as Marius stared in horror at the scene before him. Grantaire was on the floor, lying on his back and staring blankly at a canvas which he had propped against the table beside the bed. The painting was facing away from Marius; he could not see what was on it. What he could see was the blood that was pooled around Grantaire’s left wrist, which lay on the floor at his side. A sharpened painting knife was held loosely in Grantaire’s right hand, resting on his chest, which moved up and down at an alarmingly slow rate as Grantaire began to lose consciousness.

Marius scrambled his way over to Grantaire and fell to his knees beside his only remaining friend. He clamped his hands over the wounds on Grantaire’s wrist and let out an audible sob.

“Grantaire, please don’t go,” Marius begged, bowing his head in grief.

“M-move,” Grantaire whispered almost inaudibly, “Can’t…see…”

Marius turned to see what Grantaire had been looking at, his hand still holding Grantaire’s wound closed as best he could. The painting was breathtaking. It was a perfect depiction of Enjolras and Grantaire, standing side by side. Their hands were clasped tightly, and they were both smiling. The only red in this painting was Enjolras’s coat. There was no blood in this painting. No death. Only happiness.

Marius shifted to the side, giving Grantaire what he wanted – a view of his final painting. Clearly that was what Grantaire had intended this to be. A final goodbye to the man he had loved since the day he and Enjolras had met.

“Please don’t go,” Marius repeated, his voice utterly broken.

“It’s…too much,” Grantaire breathed, “I want…this…want…to see…him…”

Marius couldn’t find his voice. He just sat there, holding Grantaire’s wrist and weeping openly. He knew there was no stopping the inevitable now. Grantaire was too far gone to be saved. Grantaire smiled at his painting lovingly until his eyes lost focus and his body went completely limp.

Marius didn’t know how long he stayed there, holding a dead man’s wounds closed. It might have been minutes or hours or even days. Finally, he let go of Grantaire’s wrist and bowed over his dead friend, holding his sides tightly as if that might help contain the grief. He sobbed loudly. His breath came in unsteady gasps as he struggled to regain control over himself.

Marius placed a kiss on Grantaire’s forehead before he finally pulled himself to his feet. He left Grantaire there, alone, only long enough to stagger his way to the police. There he reported the suicide and, against the inspectors’ advice, followed them back to Grantaire’s home. Marius refused to leave until the body was taken away. Even then, he stayed in the house and sat in silence for a long while before he finally stood up to go back to Cosette.

Marius took two paintings from Grantaire’s home. The one of Les Amis at the Café Musain, and Grantaire’s final painting of Enjolras and himself. He carried them home, careful not to get blood on them, and set them down gently on a table near the door.

When Cosette saw Marius’s bloodstained skin and clothes, she gasped aloud and ran to his side. Marius explained what had happened, his voice dull and empty. They wept together. Marius for his lost friend and Cosette for her husband’s grief.

Grantaire’s paintings were hung over Marius and Cosette’s fireplace – a place of honor where they would be able to see them every day. Whenever Marius saw the paintings, he stopped and spent a moment remembering his beloved group of friends. For them, he decided to spend his life helping those in need and patiently awaited the day when he would be reunited with them at last.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry! (Not really, but you know.)  
> Sometimes it feels like everything I write is either angst or fluff, there is no in between.  
> Anyway, I hope you liked this fic! Feedback is always appreciated.


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